“It’s not god,” Leopold repeated, as if he wasn’t sure she knew what she was saying. To be fair, she didn’t blame him. After triggering the device without consulting him, there was really no way for him to know if what she’d seen was real or not. He hadn’t perused that section of the book pertaining to the device yet. All his time since deactivating the device had been spent holding Willow as she fought the tremors from reentering her body.
“It’s not,” she said, teeth chattering. “Not like the gods we were taught. It doesn’t have a mind. It’s not human. It doesn’t look human.”
“But what is it then? A circle? A portal?”
“No,” she shook her head violently. “No, not the portal. The space beyond. It’s some kind of meeting place.”
“Heaven,” Leopold supplied.
“No, not heaven,” she said, rocking back and forth. He held her tighter. “A neutral space. A nexus, where souls go after what binds them to earth is destroyed.”
“Sounds kind of like heaven,” Leopold said.
Willow tried to chuckle, but it came out as a choke. “I must have seen hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of souls. All entering the space.”
“Where happened to them? Did they disappear?”
She shook her head. “No. They went back out through other portals. Some opened without another soul coming through first, and would close after a soul passed. Others were still open from when a soul had come through, and another soul would pass before the portal had a chance to close.”
“What does it mean?” Leopold asked. “Where do those portals lead?”
“I think they lead… here. Wherever humans live. I think those portals connect them. Whenever.”
“Whenever?”
Willow nodded spasmodically. “There can’t be that many dying people in the world, there just can’t be. It has to be gathering souls from other times as well. The portals link the past to the present. When someone dies the soul escapes, and then is delivered into the future.”
“How sure are you about that,” Leopold asked. “Because it sounds far fetched.”
“Not sure at all, but it would explain the interlopers,” she said.
“The interlopers? Like Jeremy? How?”
“I saw a soul pass through a portal right after another soul had come into the space. Maybe… maybe that soul went to the original body, the one that died. Maybe that’s how someone like Jeremy came to be so far in the future and still able to remember his previous life. He hadn’t had to go through infancy again. Maybe if you can just shortcut to adulthood, or even childhood, you can remember.”
“The books he talked about,” Leopold whispered. “Weren’t they from the future? Didn’t he say that people in the past wrote about now?”
“Maybe there’s still a link between lives, even after their memory’s been wiped by infancy. Maybe that link goes both ways. Maybe information about the future can somehow, some way, make its way back into the past.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Leopold said. “Time flows in one direction. Even the researchers couldn’t find a way to reverse it.”
“I know, I know,” Willow said. “But something tells me that this is something more, something potentially outside of time. That portal, the space beyond, it wasn’t using essence at all. It wasn’t magic. If it wasn’t magic, maybe it can do what we can’t.”
Leopold looked at her hard and ground his teeth unconsciously. He glanced back at the device.
“I don’t trust that thing as far as I can throw it.”
“You could throw it pretty far, I think,” Willow said. “But don’t worry, I won’t be using it again. I’ve had about as much as I can take of the divine.”
“For one life, anyway,” Leopold said, and finally smiled.
“For now.”
🜛
They drained the essence vats and opened a portal back to Bridgewater. They took the book, although Willow wasn’t sure why she wanted to hold onto it. Just the thought of it being locked down there behind Leopold’s spell for centuries seemed like such a waste. She left the device though—it seemed dangerous beyond all comprehension.
When they walked down the street, very few pedestrians even glanced in their direction. After so many weeks it must’ve seemed normal that two mages had taken up residence in the small town, and that one of them had formerly been their own wasted and disabled Willow. Nobody asked any questions where they could hear, although she assumed that if the town was anything like it had been before she left, the rumor mill was running full-speed.
There were decisions to make, so many decisions to make. What to do with the research they’d gathered? What use would it have to her? To what she ultimately knew she needed to do? How could she best set the world up on a good path forward?
Willow’s parents asked them about where they’d gone, what they’d done, and Willow and Leopold told the truth, if keeping the details light. Nobody needed to know about the mutilated bodies in the basements, about how the dean had tried to trap them in a time-lock. It didn’t seem necessary to say, because it didn’t have an effect. The dean wouldn’t come after them, not after how easily they’d escaped. If he even knew where they were, that was.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Everything seemed set-up for a peaceful retirement, just like Leopold wanted. If it wasn’t for the scourge of pneumavores scurrying across the land. How long until they reached a city? How long until they reached a town? Would the wall defenses be able to hold them off for days? Or hours? All that speculation was for naught because they would breach those defenses eventually. The creatures weren’t made of what anyone on earth could comprehend. Whatever their bodies were, it was only adjacent to regular matter, and almost entirely unaffected by essence.
They squeezed into Willow’s old single bed and laid holding tight to each other in the dark. Willow could hear Leopold breathing, she knew he was awake, just as he knew she was. They’d changed so much already from their time in the Celestial Kingdom. After the pills Jeremy had made them cycle, they didn’t need to sleep as much as they used to. But that didn’t mean they didn’t need to rest.
So they rested, trapped in their own separate worlds.
🜛
Willow came to a decision in the morning over breakfast. Her parents seemed to notice how she clammed up, and vacated the table posthaste. That left just her and Leopold sitting there while her parents busied themselves in the kitchen.
“We have to tell the deans,” Willow said.
“Which deans?”
“All of them. They have to know what’s coming. If they can somehow… I don’t know… develop something to repel the pneumavores?”
She ran her fingers through her hair. “After seeing that thing—god, or whatever you want to call it—I just can’t conscience those things getting at even a single person.”
“If they ate someone,” Leopold said.
“I think that’s it. I don’t think the soul could survive.”
“Then what about the emperor?”
Willow shuddered at the memory. Leopold held her hand across the table. “As terrible as that was, I don’t think that thing actually ate his soul. Just his body. It certainly didn’t have the same feel as the invisible things.”
“No, you’re right,” he said, and sat in silence for a moment.
“Sun Geon,” he asked.
“I can’t imagine that his soul would’ve survived,” she said. “Maybe if one of the Watchers got him first, but there are so many more pneumavores. At least there seemed to be around the door.”
He squeezed her hand. “It’s not your fault.”
“No, I know,” she said, but in his eyes she knew he didn’t believe her.
“I didn’t know, but that doesn’t change what happened. If he really… then all of those lives, all of those experiences… just gone. Eaten, used for fuel or whatever those things do. Destroyed.”
“If we can’t close the doorway and the cities can’t repel the pneumavores,” Leopold asked. “Then what use is it to tell anybody?”
“I have to do something,” Willow said. “I can’t just run away again.”
Leopold swallowed hard and nodded. She turned her hand and squeezed his.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she said.
“Are you crazy,” he chuckled. “Sure I do.”
🜛
That afternoon they portaled straight into Dean Rain’s temporary office, which was only possible because of the hundred miniature portals Willow had opened to search for the man. They didn’t want to be interrupted.
The room was small, not much bigger than a professor’s office, and the walls were stacked sky-high with bound folios of paperwork. The dean was furiously writing when the portal irised open and Leopold and Willow stepped through. When he looked up to see them standing there, he fell straight backward.
“Wi— Pu— How—”
Willow cast the privacy spell on the inside wall of the room and it rippled across the mortared stone. The dean wasn’t having an easy time extricating himself from his overturned chair, but eventually managed it with a scramble backwards.
“What— Why—”
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Willow said. The dean’s face had grown such a sickly shade of white that she wasn’t sure he would make it through the meeting without collapsing.
“We’re not here to hurt you.”
That seemed to calm the man a tiny bit—he stopped blinking like he was experiencing his life flashing before his eyes. Leopold looked around but if he was looking for a chair, he was out of luck. The office seemed like it was mostly used for storage.
“Wha— Then why… are you here?”
Willow sighed. “We’re here to warn you. There’s something terrible coming, and we need you to be prepared for it. For this city. If you aren’t prepared, then there’s no hope. Maybe there’s no hope even now.”
The dean obsessively mopped his brow with a handkerchief until the skin underneath grew bright red, then cleared his throat.
“What kind of threat— What I mean is, and I don’t intend offense, but what could be worse than you two?”
Willow looked at Leopold and he unbuttoned his satchel, where he drew out a single sheet of light-brown paper.
🜛
“They’re invisible?” Dean Rain asked. It turned out that once given a concrete problem to solve, he recovered from his shock rather quickly. They made him sit back down while they explained what was coming.
“Not like you’re thinking,” Willow said. “You’re used to invisibility spells, even the warded tunnel—wait, do you have one of those?”
“No, only Durum did, and that was because our last warbeast was quite a bit more persistent than the others.”
“Alright, well you’re thinking of magical invisibility. These things aren’t like that—it’s like their bodies don’t interact with light at all. I was able to get a sense of where they were on the battlefield but… its more a sense of absence than anything else.”
“Explain,” he prompted.
“Ever since what happened in Asche, I’ve had this sort of second sight. An ability to see essence more or less clearly, the same as you surely can sense large concentrations of essence. Well these things, they were like voids. Even here, the natural concentration of essence in the air is high enough that I was able to sense the absence of it.”
“Here? In Raly?”
“No, not Raly,” she assured him. “In… America.”
He blinked slowly twice, then shook his head.
“Anyway,” he said. “If they do have this attribute, this lack of essence, we may be able to cobble something together that would let us sense for them. I know the Monstruacans have instruments that can sense essence concentration at range.”
“Monster-watchers,” Leopold asked. “What are those?”
“They keep tabs on the local populations of hybrids, keep watch for warbeasts, that sort of thing,” Dean Rain said, gesturing as if those kinds of activities were normal in the slightest. Willow supposed that the dean of an Arcanum would know a hell of a lot more than the students about what the city’s defenses were.
“We may be able to devise something to shield the city, even with their apparent transparency to essence. Now about this Watcher, as you called it,” he said, gesturing to the sheet and the drawing Leopold had put down of the front half of the thing. “We can see that, correct?”
“You don’t need to worry about the Watcher,” Willow said. “If it comes for the city, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But it’s not coming for you. Not here, not now. It’s headed west, toward the ocean.”
“A… western ocean,” the dean asked, surprised. Leopold turned to look at Willow as well—she hadn’t shared this with him.
“But why?”
“Because that’s where all things end,” Willow said, and left it at that.